By Sebastian M. Pfotenhauer

While European universities have often looked to America for guidance in their continuing higher-education reforms, one nation has stood out with a particularly bold trans-Atlantic approach: Portugal. The small country has recently partnered with several prestigious American universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Texas at Austin, and Harvard Medical School, to tackle some of Europe's most pervasive reform challenges in higher education.

The challenges include how to promote excellence and competitiveness in public-university systems that traditionally have sought parity; how to create strong graduate-education programs as a response to the Bologna Process, an overhaul of the university curricula in 47 European nations; how to increase internationalization; and how to better leverage science, technology, and innovation as a means to economic development.

Portugal has a proud university heritage, with the University of Coimbra dating back to 1290. However, a half-century of dictatorship hurt higher education, and the country had been struggling with insufficient access to higher education, low trust in government leadership, and delays in efforts to modernize universities. Furthermore, up to the present day, Portugal has had a large share of low- and medium-skilled workers and lacked high-skilled ones, most notably people with advanced research degrees working outside academe.

With that history, the Portuguese partnerships mark a true paradigm shift for Europe. The country's largest collaboration, the MIT-Portugal Program (MPP), represents perhaps the best example. During my time as a graduate student in MIT's Technology and Policy Program, I had the chance to work on program assessment for MPP, getting to know the offerings intimately. As a German national who had a "classical" European science education, I learned many valuable lessons about Europe's higher-education reform woes and spotted opportunities from trying to capture the inner dynamics of a program of MPP's magnitude.

A Collaborative Strategy

MPP is a highly integrative education and research consortium involving 337 Portuguese graduate students, 236 Portuguese faculty members, and 59 faculty members from MIT. It connects a single American University to a large segment of the Portuguese higher-education and research system, including eight major schools of engineering, science, and economics, 20 research centers, and numerous industry affiliates. In this asymmetric structure, MIT's role is that of a facilitator between Portuguese universities rather than a bilateral partner—a kind of "glue," as Portugal's secretary of state for science, technology, and higher education, Manuel Heitor, put it.

As part of the collaboration, Portugal's institutions work together to an unprecedented degree to increase their research abilities to an international level. What's more, for the first time in Portuguese history, MPP students are awarded degrees by multiple Portuguese universities and rotate between institutions for different parts of their studies. For example, bioengineering students study at various universities in Lisbon, followed by the universities of Minho and Coimbra, and conclude with lab rotation. This mobility gives students access to the best teachers in the country and helps them to develop connections within the national research environment.

A Program that Crosses Borders

Another pillar of MPP is internationalization. When compared with brand-name universities in America and Britain, institutions in Portugal, like the rest of continental Europe, still lag behind in global reputation. Partnering with well-known universities like MIT is helping to reverse this trend. MPP attracts foreign students at almost four times the rate of other Portuguese engineering-graduate programs. Thirty-six percent of its 2009 entering class are from outside of Portugal. It is on its way to becoming the first truly international program in Portugal, increasing the flow of ideas across borders and creating a much broader talent pool for science and technology jobs.

Also, international mobility is an important aspect of the program. Many MPP students spend time at MIT, ranging from a two-week research project to two full years. At the same time, Portuguese faculty may spend whole semesters at MIT. It has become a central part of MPP that young Portuguese faculty members audit MIT classes to gain a comparative perspective on how subjects are taught in MIT's dynamic environment. Furthermore, MIT faculty members help teach classes, either through visits to Portugal or via video.

A Push for Innovation

While international in scope, the program is equally geared toward developing an innovation strategy for Portugal. MPP focuses on engineering systems, with an approach pioneered by MIT that examines engineering topics from a cross-disciplinary perspective, involving economics, policy, management, sociology, and ethics to address broad societal challenges. It is based on the idea that innovation requires not only cutting-edge technological and scientific knowledge, but also a set of "meta-skills," such as technology transfer, entrepreneurship, innovation management, and leadership, to successfully convert new knowledge into economic and social benefits.

The focus has led to natural connections with the business world. MPP has gathered more than 50 industry partnerships around the areas of sustainable energy, transportation, bioengineering, and engineering design and advanced manufacturing. The program features industry involvement in every research project, in student theses and internships, and lecturing, and is effectively trying to establish a "revolving door" between higher education and industry. For example, MPP has adapted a version of MIT's popular "innovation teams" idea for its bioengineering course, in which students develop business plans for emerging technologies in cooperation with companies.

In many respects, then, MPP and its sister programs have been breaking ground in Portugal's higher-education system and taking a lead role in Europe. The lessons learned from Portugal's collaborative strategy could, thus, prove valuable for other countries wrestling with some of the same challenges, like the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, or Spain.

The lessons include:

• Strong networks among universities are essential in Europe to build critical mass in research and education.
• Higher education in the 21st century inevitably has an international dimension, and it must include efforts to recruit the best foreign students, to raise international visibility of institutions, and to foster mobility.
• A good mix of older and younger faculty members in an innovative program is important. In MPP, senior scholars had the personal relationships and institutional knowledge to build collaborations, while younger people had a greater willingness to try new ideas.

The biggest lesson, however, might be that the reform challenges in Europe are of a holistic sort and require comprehensive change, if not an overhaul, on many levels. Individual advances and incremental adjustments in single universities will not suffice to build the necessary momentum for preparing an entire system for the 21st century. Portugal's highly integrative collaborations have impressively demonstrated how this can be done.

Sebastian Pfotenhauer has recently graduated from MIT's Technology and Policy Program, where he has worked on program assessment for the MIT-Portugal Program. Joshua S. Jacobs, director of education for the MIT-Portugal Program, contributed to the commentary.